“Unbelievable!” exclaims Germany’s BILD tabloid: More than two years after the dieselgate scandal became public, Volkswagen Group’s premium brand Audi still “produces and sells diesel cars with the illegal software.”

“We don’t want to be just a luxury brand like Chanel, or Tag Heuer. We go to the group level, we aim to be a little bit like Richemont, or LVMH,” Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer told me yesterday in Tokyo.

For electric carmaker Tesla, Norway is a paradise. Lavish tax breaks for electric cars, combined with expropriative taxes on gas cars (such as “total taxes for a Chevrolet Camarao V6? 125,000 dollars” as a Redditor writes) are the reason why nearly one in every ten Tesla cars go to the rugged and cold 5 million people country in Scandinavia. In yet another blow in a rough week, Tesla is about to lose its Nordic paradise.

“Norway plans to trim lavish tax breaks for Tesla and other electric cars that have given it the world’s highest rate of battery-vehicle ownership,” Reuters wrote today after reading a proposal by Norway’s right-wing government. At closer reading, one sees that the main target is Tesla. [Continue Reading]

Volkswagen customers the world over are still waiting for the definitive dieselgate fix. Meanwhile, the company is busy with itself.

Volkswagen CEO Matthias Müller lost a boardroom showdown with the company’s powerful union, along with an important lieutenant, Germanys BILD Zeitung says. According the in VW matters usually well informed paper, Müller wanted to reinstall Porsche’s R&D chief Wolfgang Hatz. The request was denied.

Europe’s auto industry is desperately trying to paint dieselgate as an isolated lapse of judgement by Volkswagen, while Volkswagen is desperately trying to paint dieselgate as the work of a “couple of engineers” lacking parental supervision. The transparent paint-job has received a huge crack today when Germany’s Daimler AG was found using the defeat device Daimler’s mustachioed CEO Dieter Zetsche has sworn not to exist.

According to euromyths, and all too often according to law, everything in Europe is regulated by commissars in Brussels, from the bend radius of bananas (law repealed) to a ban on eating your pet horse (law in effect.) Everything but automobiles, as it turns out. There is no central oversight, the decision on what cars are allowed on Europe’s roads rests solely in the hands of individual member states. If a EU state does not want to take action against a misbehaving national carmaker, there is nobody in Europe who can. Governments have a vested interest, if not outright shares, in their carmakers, which explains why no EU government has imposed a penalty on Volkswagen, never mind that some 8.5 million of the 11 million vehicles globally equipped with VW’s defeat devices are on Europe’s roads, emitting massive doses of cancer-causing gases with barely a finger-wagging. In light of the scandal, there is a proposal circulating in Brussels that wants to tighten the loose rules.

Pressure is building on Volkswagen and German government agencies to come clean about the dieselgate scandal. Volkswagen’s second-biggest shareholder has given VW a three-month deadline to provide a full account of the scandal, while German lobby group Deutsche Umwelthilfe, frustrated because Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA) has yet to provide details about the recall of millions of affected Volkswagen diesel cars, has brought suit against the regulator.